Trusting The Designers: Machinarium

I liked it, and will probably pick up the full game one of these days if it goes on sale. I like some adventure games (“The Dig”) but don’t like others (“King’s Quest 7”). The genre really is a mixed bag. Machinarium’s demo plays fairly well, though, so I recommend at least the demo to anyone who is interested.

In the meantime, the demo reminded me of the importance of trust in game design. There was a point in the demo where I found my gamer instincts warring with reality. Naturally, Here Lie Spoilers…

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The game is all about clicking on stuff, trying to find what you need to solve puzzles. Sometimes, you have to combine objects you’ve gathered to progress.

Level 2 has your character trying to get through a security checkpoint. You need to devise a disguise to get past the sentry. At one point, you pick up a traffic cone as part of the disguise, but there’s still a stack of cones left over. You can click on the stack, and the character throws a cone into the nearby canyon. This is where I ran into trouble. I wasn’t sure that I’d never need another cone, so throwing them in the canyon seemed like an irreversible move that I might regret later. I never want to get stuck in a game, so I don’t like irreversible moves.

Thing is, you need to throw all the cones overboard to get to a puzzle piece under the stack. I only found this after I had exhausted all other possible moves and just went ahead and threw caution to the wind. I didn’t want to get myself stuck, but the devs were a step ahead of me and made the game so that I couldn’t get stuck. My instinctual desire to keep all potential puzzle pieces around until I had it solved, a sort of MacGyver/Packratitis affliction, ran contrary to the solution of throwing away potential puzzle pieces to get to the solution.

This might just be a set of mixed expectations, just as much my fault as the designers, since often in these adventure games you actually do need everything and even a lot of apparently useless stuff to solve the puzzles. In a way, this skirts Twinkie Denial conditions of “extreme lateral thinking” and “no lateral/logical thinking”. Some pieces just don’t make sense unless you’re reading the devs’ minds, and some are blindingly obvious in their function… which means they don’t really work that way in the game’s logic.

Still, I don’t like throwing pieces away that might have a use later. I had to trust that the devs knew best by having my little character throw the cones away. That wasn’t something I did lightly, and I find that it reveals a slightly untrusting/adversarial relationship that I have with puzzle designers. (In contrast, the only reason I’m still working on one puzzle in Professor Layton and the Curious Village is because I do trust the devs that there’s an answer to it, despite evidence to the contrary. Funny how that works out.)

All in all, this is probably just as much, if not more, about my approach to the game. I don’t like throwing away potential puzzle pieces. I don’t like needing to trust the devs that much, especially when the puzzles themselves may well get increasingly obscure as the game goes on. I detest needing to read the designer’s mind; to me that’s the sign of lazy puzzle design.

I do still like the game. I’m leaning toward buying it at some point. It’s just not a perfect game, and this tenuous trust between player and designer can make or break a game, especially one based on puzzles. Players need to know that they will have all the tools and pieces at their disposal, and that their cleverness will carry the day. That’s the backbone of the puzzle/adventure game genre, and really something that should be the core of the design. Obscure elements or lack of communication of clear goals, tools and pieces can kill a game like this very quickly. Some of this is UI design, some of it is game design, but players need to be able to trust the designers… even if (maybe especially when) they default to “not trusting”.

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5 Responses

The ‘trust’ angle is an interesting one that I’d never really considered. Depending on the game, the type of trust relationship that you develop with the designers is bound to differ.

For example in something like a classic roguelike (Nethack or what have you) the only trust I’d have is that there will be an exit to a given level – however I’d never trust them to make it easy (or even possible) to reach given the nature of the game.

On the other hand, in a puzzle game you almost have to come in trusting that there will be a solution to every puzzle, and there is no way to actually put the game in a permanent failure state. If that isn’t present, there’s a huge problem.

As for Machinarium I might still purchase it despite my negative review if Steam puts it on sale for $2.49 or $5.00.

I may just have to give that a shot. Right now, my attention is at a premium for games, but I’m thinking of starting either the newest Riddick game on PC, Resident Evil 4 on PS2 I just picked up used, or Final Fantasy XII since I’ve never gone through it all the way.

What I don’t like about adventure/puzzle games is the designers often only include one solution to their puzzles so it’s rare to find a game, like Scribblenauts, which lets you solve one puzzle in a multitude of ways.

This means even though you say to yourself, “Oh, if I combine these two items I’ll create this, and can do this and then that will happen,” the designers have already decided that no, you’re not going to be combining those two items and trying this because they don’t want ‘that’ to happen because ‘that’ is not how they want you to solve ‘their’ puzzle.

In the end I’m left mindlessly clicking all the items in my inventory in an attempt not to solve the puzzle I’ve already solved in my mind, but to work out how the designer wants me to solve the puzzle. I’m no longer trying to solve a puzzle, I’m now trying to work out how someone else wants me to solve their puzzle.